With the introduction of Ryzen and more recently the announcement of Threadripper processors the processor market and channel has been turned up-side down. It gave Intel an awakening call and as such they needed to step up, significantly.

Intel’s primary processor business has been releasing and refreshing quad-core processors for years now with an E type (e.g. Broadwell-E / Haswell-E) processor release every now and then. They had no rush and have been competitive and relaxed all the way for years now. Zen or Ryzen Intel did anticipate, but the the AMD consumer aimed Threadripper 16-core and Naples sever segment 32-core made Intel step up its game a notch.

Initially it was expected that Intel would announce a new 10 and maybe 12-core processor based on Skylake-X architecture. With everything that has been going on, there now has been a number of announcements going from top to bottom with an unexpected quad-core Kaby-Lake-X release as well as announcements that entails Intel to release 18-core processors. There’s more to it than that as Intel might simply be trying to steal some of the Threadripper momentum. Next week the first Skylake-X processors are going to be released. But you will not see any availability for the 18, 16,14 or even 12-core parts. Skylake-X will release up-to 10-cores (only). It is rumored that in August we’ll see some higher-specced parts, but there even is a rumor that the 18-core 2000 USD flagship might not see retail availability until 2018. And sure you will see some reviews on that part this year, but showing a working processor and retail availability, well these are two very different things.

It has been a bit of a mess with Intel, I can honestly say that. Here in the EU Intel has killed all marketing, press and PR activities. Hence media all over Europe is not receiving any information from Intel anymore, that’s the same samples wise, Intel does not seed samples for review anymore. Hence you’ll see reviews next week based on a handful cherry-picked USA websites that are on a marketing-drip directly from Intel. The rest of the media will need to somehow borrow their samples from Intel partners. Yes, it’s a big freaking mess with everything and anything Intel alright when it comes to media related matters. That said in this preview I wanted to take you guys a little deeper into the architecture and processor series that is Skylake-X, the Core X series.

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